Life Stories

Barry Yourgrau actually lives just around the corner from me in Queens, so it was absurdly easy for us to get together to chat about his memoir, Mess—and the fact that this episode was recorded in my kitchen explains the occasional traffic noises from outside the second-floor window. Anyway, we had a great time talking about why he didn’t let anyone into his working studio—not even his girlfriend, whose apartment it was originally—and what happened when she finally told him to get it together. That led us to the differences between clutter and hoarding, and about how his efforts to create a document of his efforts to finally clear out his apartment sometimes created a “double block,” where he wasn’t writing and wasn’t cleaning. And then I mentioned how Mess foregrounds one of the fundamental qualities of memoir, the way in which it offers the memoirist’s life up for judgment, because that’s something Yourgrau does himself with practically everyone he encounters in the course of his story. Here’s what he said about that:

“To a certain extent, memoir is… people have doors which they—this is my room, don’t go in, a room of one’s own, right? So in a certain sense, a memoir opens that door. So for an artist to go into there is really difficult, a process of tremendous opening up vulnerability. But, on the other hand, the act of writing is a way of controlling.

Nobody’s memoir is the forensic truth… I mean, how many memoirs have you read where people remember conversations in their childhood? You tell me one person who remembers what they said in the kitchen to their mother. I mean, they may generally remember, but if they start offering you dialogue, it’s all constructed. Sometimes constructed with more veracity, sometimes constructed with less veracity…

For me, one of the things that’s interesting is that I’m usually a fiction writer, of, if I may say so, surreal fiction, but it’s surreal fiction like dreams, which means that it’s actually rather revelatory and confessional… I’m known kind of as a fantasist or something, but actually everything is—they’re all based on emotional events in my life that I dress up and change.”

Two collections of his early stories, Haunted Traveller (which is subtitled “An Imaginary Memoir”) and Wearing Dad’s Head, have just been reissued in paperback as well.

Listen to Life Stories #87: Barry Yourgrau (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

photo: Charles Raben / Urban Face

After Matteson Perry broke up with his “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” he realized that he’d never really not been in a serious relationship since high school, and decided it was time to get casual. Available recounts his adventures, and over the course of our conversation he explained what he learned about himself during his year of no-strings-attached dating, including how the validation he got from being able to land so many first dates was like the thrill he got as a stand-up performer—as well as how he ended up meeting his wife (and not dating her for several months), and what she thought when he told her he was going to write a book about how he was playing the field just before they started seeing each other. We also talked about how this very clearly isn’t a book about how to pick up women and how, as he tells his stories, he’s generally careful to make himself the butt of any jokes, treating the women on the other side of the anecdotes with empathy:

“Through storytelling, I know what works with a crowd for me, and angry and mean does not work for me. There’s some comics, they can work angry and mean, it’s hilarious; I’m not one of those comics. I need to be self-effacing and empathetic and thoughtful about things and then find humor there.

So I tried to take that point of view, and the other thing that helped is my agent is a woman, and so she would let me know when I was being a douchebag in the book, and we would rework it. Not that you would change a story, but think about it from the other person’s point of view—you know, okay, I can see how that would be taken the wrong way by a woman—this specific woman, or any woman—and let’s think about how this felt to her as well.”

Listen to Life Stories #86: Matteson Perry (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

photo: Stephanie Nelson

I didn’t realize until well into my conversation with Kim Addonizio that she’d written (but never published) a full-length memoir, a straightforward narrative about the breakup of a longterm relationship, before Bukowski in a Sundress, the collection of autobiographical essays that we’d met to discuss. That got us to talking about rejection and failure, which dovetailed nicely into some of the larger themes we’d been pursuing about finding the right voice for each of these essays—some of which deal with personal relationships, some of which tackle the writing process, some of which play directly with her reputation as a “confessional” poet—and about claiming her space as a woman dealing with all the things women have to deal with in literary culture. The “Bukowski in a Sundress” tag, for example, had been pinned on her condescendingly by a male critic, and she came to embrace it ironically… then we got to talking about other writers who’d been a much stronger influence on her:

“When I was just starting out as a poet, Sharon Olds was very important to me, because she said things in poems that I didn’t know you could say, and that opened up a lot for me in terms of realizing you could actually talk about things that I thought weren’t supposed to be in serious poetry. And in prose, people like Kathy Acker, for example—at one point, I was reading a lot of [Henry] Miller and Jean Genet and Kathy Acker and Georges Bataille… and Susan Sontag’s essay ‘The Pornographic Imagination,’ and thinking about all those things as modes of writing, expanding the possibilities of what could be said and understanding that writing is about being human, so nothing about being human should be off limits to us as writers.

And for some reason, for some people that seemed to be a new idea in poetry, which makes no sense to me. We’ve got Catullus, we’ve got all sorts of people throughout history who’ve been doing this, and yet I got called ‘edgy’ a lot of times, and I thought, well, I don’t really understand what’s edgy about it. It’s human experience and so why not talk about anything that we are obsessed with or interested in or thinking about or experiencing? And I guess I’ve just always been drawn to a certain aspect of experience. I’m always sort of going down rather than looking up.

I’m not sure why; I mean I could have some sort of therapeutic, psychological reasons why that’s true, but I’ve just been drawn more to the margins and the stuff that is maybe not as talked about in polite conversation. I mean, if I go to a dinner party and people are sitting there stiffly, my first reaction is I want to fuck this up somehow. I want to make some trouble here. Not out of disrespect, but because it’s just hard for me to tolerate a certain kind of decorum… I guess it just goes back to what your character is.”

Listen to Life Stories #85: Kim Addonizio (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

photo: via KimAddonizio.com

In the winter of 1992, Emily Winslow was a young theater major getting ready for her next semester when she was followed into her building by a stranger who then forced his way into her apartment and raped her. Over the years, she had kept in touch with the sex crimes unit of the Pittsburgh police, even after she moved to Cambridge, England. Then, in 2013, the DNA evidence finally produces a match. The suspect is arrested, and the path to justice begins. Jane Doe January is Winslow’s account of the months that followed—including her frustration when many of those close to her, unsure of how to address the situation, kept an emotional distance that was, just then, the very last thing she needed.

In our conversation, we talk about that, and about why she maintains that what she did isn’t “brave,” and didn’t bring her “closure.” She also dispels an assumption I had made about the journals she was keeping throughout these events, and how it was only later that she decided to turn them into a memoir. No, she told me, this was the plan all along:

“People talk about writing about traumatic experiences as being therapeutic, because it helps you get it out of you. That is true, but for me, that is step one. For me, what’s therapeutic about it is not just letting it out; it’s letting it out and picking it up and using my skills and using my talent to make something that stands alone from me, apart from the crime, and is something beautiful. I wanted to write a beautiful book. I wanted to write a book that was interesting. So for me the therapeutic aspect wasn’t just letting it out. It was, from the very start, crafting it. Because that’s what I do—I use words. That’s what I do.”

Listen to Life Stories #84: Emily Winslow (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

photo: Jonathan Player

In her memoir, Beijing Bastard, Val Wang writes about growing up as a Chinese-American and then moving to Beijing in the late 1990s: “I think a lot of people think I was looking for my roots; that’s a popular storyline for a Chinese-American. But it was really the opposite for me. I was really rebelling from my roots and looking for myself. That very American kind of journey abroad to find yourself is what I thought I was there for.”

Beijing Bastard (the title comes from one of her favorite Chinese movies) is the story of how she delved into the culture, including how she abandoned the expensive housing that was designated for foreigners to find an apartment in a neighborhood so far on the outskirts that the roads eventually ran out of pavement. In our conversation, which was recorded back in 2014, she talks about how moving to China initially made her feel more American, as she began to notice “ways of thinking, ways of walking, ways of talking, ways of gesticulating” in her behavior that helped her understand she wasn’t “coming back” to China; for her, even though she’d grown up hearing about China from her family, it was all new for her. We also discuss how, when she came back to the United States, how she pursued her career as a documentary filmmaker… and why it took twelve years for her to be able to write the story of her time in Beijing the way it needed to be told.

Listen to Life Stories #83: Val Wang (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

photo: Kelly Creedon

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Maria Venegas talks about Bulletproof Vest. It’s the story of her father, who brought his family to Chicago from Mexico, but then abandoned them to avoid being arrested for killing one of their neighbors. But Venegas doesn’t just recount this and other violent episodes from his life; she also writes about the abandonment (and the eventual reconciliation) from her perspective, coming to terms with the ways her father’s past shaped her own emotional development.

During the interview, we talked about how she’d originally intended to write Bulletproof Vest as fiction, and why it ended up becoming a memoir—and about how she came to writing through acting first. It was acting, she says, that first enabled her to deal with the emotions she’d been suppressing for much of her life, but then writing enabled her to grapple with the actual sources of those emotions. And she’d only hit upon acting, she revealed, because of an elective course her last year of college, after she’d already met the requirements for her economics major. She described the impact that a class she’d only signed up for because she thought it would be fun:

“It was really exciting when I realized I could access these emotions and express myself through acting in a way that I’d never known to be possible. But, you know, with acting it’s also… you’re using your own well of emotions to fuel this other character, so you’re still slightly removed from it, whereas with writing I feel, you know, that’s me on the page, and it feels a lot more vulnerable in a way.

Listen to Life Stories #82: Maria Venegas (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

Nicole Kear was 19 when she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that, at the time it was discovered, was chipping away at her peripheral and night vision and would, she was told, result in more and more loss of vision over the years. Your life is going to change dramatically, her doctor told her; start planning now. So, as she writes in her new memoir, Now I See You, she made an enormous effort to keep her deteriorating eyesight a secret from all but those closest to her for years. In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, we talk about the fears that drove that decision… and about what it was like, after hiding her condition for so long, to put the truth in a book for everyone to see:

“When I was writing it, people would say ‘What’s it about?’ and I would realize that if I told them what the book was about, clearly they would know my whole story. I really didn’t want to tell them, so I would be super evasive and basically not reveal what the book was about, and just, you know, say it was about parenting or something. Essentially lie about the book. It got to the point where my friend, who’s also a writer, was like, ‘You are literally writing a secret book about your secret eye disease! You do want people to buy the book, right? Perhaps that will help you to come to terms with this!’

I remember when the book went up on Amazon, and I linked to it on social media, and all of these people that I knew, the next few days, just were like ‘Wowwwwww. We thought it was fiction, but we went back and saw it was a memoir… is that really true?’

And at first it was excruciating, and then I was like, this is great. It was so the opposite of excruciating, it was really liberating. And now it’s amazing, because everyone knows, and if they want to know any pertinent details, I can refer them to my book, and I don’t even have to worry about having that awkward conversation…”

Listen to Life Stories #81: Nicole C. Kear (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Ava Chin discusses some of the things she’s learned foraging for edible plants within New York City limits—but that’s only half the story of Eating Wildly. She also writes about growing up as the only daughter of an emotionally distant single mother and grandparents who encouraged her to enjoy many different types of foods, and how that—and what happened when she finally connected with her father—shaped her adult relationships. As our conversation turned to some of Chin’s favorite memoirists, we talked about how her method of combining personal reflections with recipes echoes Molly Wizenberg, and then she cited Patti Smith’s Just Kids:

“It’s not just that it’s written by Patti Smith and she’s an amazing writer; it’s not just that she’s Patti Smith and she’s writing about her relationship with Mapplethorpe, or that it’s New York in the ’70s… It’s all those things plus—what she did was she wrote following the heat of the story, the emotional heart of her story. And I think that’s necessary to have readers turn the page and to be thoroughly engaged in the narrative.”

Chin could have simply written about foraging and the ways that it’s affected how she thinks about food and her place in the food economy; after all, she’d been writing on the subject online at the New York Times for several years. But “I didn’t want this book to be a guidebook,” she explained. “I felt like I needed to tell this story in a way that a 700-word blog post, even a series of them, couldn’t.” In doing so, she was able to confront the identity that others had imposed on her from before she was even born and take the steps towards redefining herself in a more fulfilling way.

Listen to Life Stories #80: Ava Chin (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

When Molly Wizenberg‘s husband told her that he wanted to open a New York-style pizzeria in Seattle, she encouraged him—even though, as she explains in this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, she wasn’t convinced his plan would come to fruition. In Delancey, she tells the story of how it all came together, including what happened when her doubts finally came out in the open, and how she wound up becoming a full partner in the project—and so we talked about the point at which she realized that this was going to be the subject of her second memoir (following A Homemade Life:

“As Brandon was building it, and as the process began to switch from ‘my husband is opening a restaurant’ to ‘we are opening a restaurant,’ I started to realize that there was a story there. I didn’t really know what the story was yet, but it was there. And also, as soon as I could begin to get some distance from it, I could see that it was really funny. The things that we did, the mistakes that we made, the things that happened to us were not at all funny at the time, but in retrospect, it was a really funny story.

I wanted to figure out how to tell it both so that I could remember it and also so that I could understand the trajectory that our lives were headed in. Writing helps me understand my own life; it helps me see the throughline in my own life… Writing Delancey, when I started, I didn’t know how the book was going to end, and that was because I had to figure out the story as I went along.”

(By all accounts, Delancey the restaurant has turned out really well, and I’m looking forward to visiting it the next time I’m in Seattle…)

Listen to Life Stories #79: Molly Wizenberg (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Jen Doll talks about her experiences as a serial wedding guest, as recounted in her memoir Save the Date. So we discussed how she came up with the idea of writing a book around (some of) the weddings she’s attended, what it’s like periodically reuniting with the same friends—and, in one case, former friend, how our parents’ relationships shape our personal concepts of marriage, and, as long as we’re telling wedding stories, which ones are the most embarrassing:

“I think the most really sad embarrassing thing that I’ve done has been allowing my stubbornness and immaturity create a situation where a relationship couldn’t be regained [with the former friend she’d run into at several weddings]… You know, I don’t actually think that I was wrong, just like I don’t think she was wrong, but I wish that I’d handled it differently. And so it’s embarrassing to think back about those weddings and think, ‘Yeah, you kinda drank too much and you end up puking and screaming at someone…’ That’s pretty awful.

On the other side of that—I think this is a more funny embarrassing moment, because all was forgiven and my friends now think of it as a funny story… It’s the moment where I threw my shoes down the road because I refused to leave a party and it sounds horrible, but it also now is the stuff of legend in my friend group, and the bride and groom think it’s really funny. So, I feel better about that, even though I wish I hadn’t done it.”

Listen to Life Stories #78: Jen Doll (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)